The first of these consisted in a fragmentation of the synoptic view of Herodotus into the systematic
exploitation of local traditions, and more importantly local archives. These local or ethnic histories
satisfied the interests of a local audience for the history of their particular city, and continued to be
written throughout antiquity as long as the polis survived; all are now lost, but the Augustan critic
Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes their general characteristics:
These men made similar choices about the selection of their subjects, and their powers were not so very
different from one another, some of them writing histories about the Greeks and some about the
barbarians, and not linking all these to one another, but dividing them according to peoples and cities,
and writing about them separately, all keeping to one and the same aim: whatever oral traditions were
preserved locally among peoples or cities, and whatever documents were stored in holy places or
archives, to bring these to the common notice of everyone just as they were received, neither adding to
them nor subtracting from them. {On Thucydides 5)
This movement for the first time in Greece set the written archive alongside oral tradition as a source for
history; two figures from its earliest stages will illustrate its character. About the end of the fifth century
Hippias of Elis, travelling sophist and lecturer on antiquities of cities, published the victor list of the
Olympic Games, which took chronology back in a four-year cycle to 776 B.C.; this became the basis for
Greek time-reckoning, just as the Romans counted from the foundation of their city, the early Christians
from the birth of Abraham, and ourselves from the birth of Christ. Chronology, the dating and ordering
of human events, is the basic grammar of history: Hippias began a tradition which continued through the
Hellenistic period, to produce in late antiquity the surviving chronological tables of sacred and profane
history compiled by the Christian writers Eusebius and Saint Jerome.
Hellanicus of Lesbos in the last third of the fifth century similarly published a whole series of local
histories and chronographies (at least twenty-eight), based at least in part on archival research. Among
these was the first history of Athens; and the discovery in Egypt of a papyrus of Aristotle's lost work on
the Constitution of Athens (written in the late fourth century) enables us to reconstruct the development
of one city history in some detail. The Atthis (or history of Athens) began with Hellanicus, a non-
Athenian working in a wider tradition; later authors were mainly Athenian, often from priestly families
(Cleidemus) or politicians (Androtion, the author on whom Aristotle largely relied) or both (Philo-
chorus). Their works were characterized from the start on the one hand by a strong interest in local
myth, on the other by the possession of a firm chronology: events were arranged (perhaps somewhat
arbitrarily) in accordance with the Athenian list of their annual chief magistrate or archon. Fragments of
such a list inscribed on stone and dating from the 420s B.C. have in fact been found in the Athenian
agora: the public record is almost certainly evidence of state interest in the discoveries of Hellanicus,
which stimulated the Athenians to set their archives in order. This is a good illustration of the interplay
between civic pride and the writing of history; not surprisingly such a tradition is dominated by the
interests of the polis, its local cults and its politics.
Thucydides